Tuesday, March 01, 2016

Here's a familiar-sounding quote about the Presidential race, which I found en route to other things:

It is the status quo that got the worst beating ... the
hopeless, aimless, corrupt, mealy-mouthed and violence-ridden status
quo of the consensus-centrist-pragmatist policies. People are sick of
lies, evasions, uncertainty, broken promises, switching stands,
inexplicable contradictions, chronic emergencies, and the inexorable
reality of the fact that, under all the grandiose slogans, things are
growing worse and worse. People know that the country cannot go on
like this much longer. But since they do not know which direction it
ought to take -- since neither the politicians nor the commentators
nor the professors nor the intellectual leaders will tell them --
people have reached the only conclusion open to the helplessly
frustrated: "Anything is better than this!" They have expressed it by
voting almost indiscriminately against the middle -- by voting for two
"extremists" who seemed to be the strongest opponents of the status
quo...

Regulars here will probably guess that Ayn Rand
said this. And they would be correct. In fact, she said this about
the 1972 race. (To be precise, she said this in the July 3,
1972 issue of The Ayn Rand Letter.) The "extremists" in that
election were Senator George McGovern and Alabama's segregationist
Governor, George Wallace, and their general political philosophies and
core constituencies correspond to those of Bernie Sanders and Donald
Trump, respectively. The similarities to 1972 continue, with the third
top candidate, Hillary Clinton, being this year's unpopular, corrupt
counterpart to Richard Nixon. The similarities, although striking, end
there, as far as the candidates are concerned. (The general problem --
a stagnant mixed economy and a dissatisfied public who are largely
unaware of a viable
alternative -- remains the same.)

That election ended
with a stark choice, between Nixon, whom Rand stated could not be
trusted to improve the situation, and McGovern, whom Rand
warned could be trusted to make it worse. The resulting
landslide affirmed, to Rand's relief, that the American public were
not ready for mass immolation on the altar of the so-called public
good: Their individualistic sense of
life carried the day. (Her commentary on this election, in "A
Preview" and "The American Spirit," in The Ayn Rand Letter, are
very interesting reading.)

The primaries are not over, but
this year's election seems likely to end up being between Trump and
Clinton. Both of these can be trusted to attack individual rights. The
American sense of life is not so strong as it was nearly half a
century ago, nor would such a choice be as clear-cut in either
appearance or outcome: Trump's success and manner very superficially
appeal to elements of the American sense of life, but this man is
no capitalist (not that Nixon was). And Clinton is ideologically
indistinguishable from Sanders, although her knack for alienating
ordinary Americans and galvanizing opposition might accidentally save
the country from complete disaster.